Abstract

The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj’s sound piece Starry Night. Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece
stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live
bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages
the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs,
the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of
political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified:
the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence,
and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj’s
subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou’s elaboration of the concept of the subject
as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.

aesthetic form, Badiou, Mazen Kerbaj, splace, state, violence

References

Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy (London: Verso, 1971)

Althusser, LouisMachiavelli and Us (London: Verso, 2000)

Althusser, Louis, , Essays in Self-Criticism (London: Verso, 1976)

Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)

Badiou, Alain, Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009)

Balibar, Étienne, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: New Left Books, 1977)

Benjamin, Walter, One Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979)

Cardew, Cornelius, Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971)

Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)